The Developmentof British Landscape Painting

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Title: The development of British landscape painting in water-colours

Author: Alexander Joseph Finberg
E. A. Taylor

Editor: Charles Holme

Release Date: October 6, 2020 [EBook #63388]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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THE DEVELOPMENT
OF BRITISH LAND-
SCAPE PAINTING
IN WATER-COLOURS

EDITED BY CHARLES
HOLME. TEXT BY
A L E X A N D E R J.
F I N B E R G & E. A.
TAYLOR

MCMXVIII
“THE STUDIO” LTD.

LONDON PARIS NEW YORK

CONTENTS

ARTICLES

PAGE

The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-Colours. By Alexander J. Finberg
1

(1) Introductory Remarks on the Idea of Development as Applied to Art
1

(2) The Bearing of these Remarks on the History of British Water-Colour Painting
3

(3) The Development of Subject-Matter and Technique
4

(4) Some Famous Water-Colour Painters of the Past
8

Paul Sandby
9

Alexander Cozens
10

John Robert Cozens
11

Thomas Girtin
13

Joseph Mallord William Turner
15

John Sell Cotman
17

David Cox
19

Samuel Prout
20

Peter de Wint
21

Richard Parkes Bonington
21

Myles Birket Foster
22

Alfred William Hunt
23

James Abbott McNeill Whistler
24

(5) The Work of To-day
26

The Development of British Landscape Painting in Water-Colours: Scottish Painters. By E. A. Taylor
29

ILLUSTRATIONS

AFTER ENGLISH PAINTERS

PLATE

Birch, S. J. Lamorna, R.W.S. “Environs of Camborne”
V

Cozens, J. R. “Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo”
I

Fisher, Mark, A.R.A. “Landscape”
VI

Gere, Charles M. “The Round House”
VII

Goodwin, Albert, R.W.S. “Lincoln”
VIII

Holmes, C. J. “Near Aisgill”
IX

T

Little, Robert, R.W.S., R.S.W. “Tidal Basin, Montrose”
X

Rich, Alfred W. “Swaledale”
XI

Smythe, Lionel, R.A., R.W.S. “Caught in the Frozen Palms of Spring”
XII

Turner, J. M. W., R.A. “Launceston”
IV

Walker, W. Eyre, R.W.S. “A Pool in the Woods”
XIII

Waterlow, Sir E. A., R.A., R.W.S., H.R.S.W. “In Crowhurst Park, Sussex”
XIV

AFTER SCOTTISH PAINTERS

Allan, Robert W. Allan, R.W.S., R.S.W. “The Maple in Autumn”
XV

Brown, A. K., R.S.A., R.S.W. “Ben More”
XVI

Cadenhead, James, A.R.S.A., R.S.W. “A Moorland”
XVII

Cameron, D. Y., A.R.A., R.S.A., R.W.S., R.S.W. “Autumn in Strath Tay”
XVIII

Flint, W. Russell, R.W.S., R.S.W. “Autumn Evening, Rydal Water”
XIX

Houston, George, A.R.S.A., R.S.W. “Iona”
XX

Paterson, James, R.S.A., R.W.S., R.S.W. “Frenchland to Queensberry, Moffat Dale”
XXI

Smith, D. Murray, A.R.W.S. “On the Way to the South Downs”
XXII

Taylor, E. A. “A Bit of High Corrie”
XXIII

Walton, E. A., R.S.A., P.R.S.W. “Suffolk Pastures”
XXIV

PREFATORY NOTE

The Editor desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to the artists and
owners who have kindly lent their drawings for reproduction in this volume

THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH

LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN WATER-COLOURS.

BY ALEXANDER J. FINBERG

(1) INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE IDEA OF DEVELOPMENT AS APPLIED TO ART

HE idea of development has played, for considerably more than half a century, and still plays, a large part in all discussions about
art. And it is obvious that it is a very useful and at the same time a very dangerous idea; useful, because with its aid you can
prove anything you have a mind to, and dangerous, because it conceals all sorts of latent suggestions, vague presuppositions, and

lurking misconceptions, and thus misleads and beguiles the unwary. The most insidious and dangerous of these suggestions is its
connexion with the ideas of progress or advance. The dictionaries, indeed, give “progress” as one of the synonyms of “development,”
and amongst the synonyms of “progress” I find “advance,” “attainment,” “growth,” “improvement,” and “proficiency.” So that as soon
as we begin to connect the idea of development with the history of art we find ourselves committed, before we quite realize what we
are doing, to the view that the latest productions of art are necessarily the best. If art develops, it necessarily grows, improves, and
advances, and the history of art becomes a record of the steps by which primitive work has passed into the fully developed art of the
present; the latest productions being evidently the most valuable, because they sum up in their triumphant complexity all the tentative
variations and advances of which time and experience have approved.
Stated thus baldly the idea as applied to art seems perhaps too obviously at variance with our tastes, experience, and instinctive
standards of artistic values to be worth a moment’s consideration. Yet we are all too well aware that this is the line of argument by
which every freak, every eccentric, insane or immoral manifestation of artistic perversity and incompetence which has appeared in
Europe within the last thirty or forty years has been commended and justified. Certainly in England every writer on art who calls himself
“advanced” is an evolutionist of this crude and uncritical type. At one time it was Cézanne and Van Gogh who were supposed to have
summed up in their triumphant complexity the less developed efforts of Titian, Rembrandt, Watteau, and Turner, and at the present
moment Cézanne and Van Gogh are being superseded by Mr. Roger Fry and his young lions of “The New Movement.”
The worst of it is that the idea of development, of evolution, is a perfectly sound and useful one in certain spheres of activity. In
science, for instance, the idea works and is helpful. The successive modifications and improvements by which the latest type of steam-
engine has been evolved from Stevenson’s “Puffing Billy,” or the latest type of air-ship from the Montgolfier balloon, form a series of
steps which are related and connected with each other, and they are so intimately connected that the latest step sums up and
supersedes all the others. No one would travel with Stevenson’s engine who could employ a British or American engine of the latest

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type. There we have a definite system of development—of growth, improvement, and increased proficiency. And we find the same
thing if we look at science as a whole, as a body of knowledge of a special kind. Its problems are tied together, subordinated and co-
ordinated, unified in one vast system, so that we can represent its history as a single line of progress or retreat.
But art is not like science. Donatello’s sculpture is not a growth from the sculpture of Pheidias or Praxiteles in the same way that the
London and North-Western engine is a growth from Stevenson’s model; nor was Raphael’s work developed from Giotto’s in the
same way. Works of art are separate and independent things. That is why Donatello has not superseded Pheidias, nor Raphael Giotto;
and that is why the world cherishes the earliest works of art quite as much as the later ones.
Yet we are bound to admit that we can find traces of an evolutionary process even in the history of art, if we look diligently for them. I
remember to have seen a book by a well-known Italian critic in which the representations of the Madonna are exhibited from this point
of view (A. Venturi, “La Madonna,” Milan, 1899). In it the pictures of the Madonna are treated as an organism which gradually
develops, attains perfection, gets old, and dies. There is something to be said for this point of view. When you have a number of artists
successively treating the same subject you naturally find that alterations and fresh ideas are imported into their work. These additions
and modifications can quite fairly be regarded as developments of the subject-matter and its treatment. But such developments are
always partial and one-sided, and they are accompanied with losses of another kind. If Raphael’s Madonnas are more correctly drawn
and modelled than those of Giotto, these gains are balanced by a corresponding loss in the spiritual qualities of sincerity and
earnestness of religious conviction. It depends, therefore, on what narrow and strictly defined point of view we adopt whether we find
development or decay in any particular series of artistic productions. From one point of view the history of art from Giotto to Raphael
can be regarded as a process of growth and advance, from another, the same series can be taken, as Ruskin actually took it, as an
exhibition of the processes of death and decay. The enlightened lover and student of art will look at the matter from both, and other,
points of view, but he will realize that the theory of development does not help him in any way to find a standard of value for works of
art.
Art must be judged by its own standards, and those standards tell us

[Image unavailable.]

PLATE I.

(In the possession of C. Morland Agnew, Esq.)

“LAKE ALBANO AND CASTEL GANDOLFO.” BY J. R. COZENS.

that each individual masterpiece is perfect in its own marvellous way, whether it was produced like the Cheik el Beled or The Scribe,
some five or six thousand years ago, or like the paintings of Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Turner within comparatively recent times.

(2) THE BEARING OF THESE REMARKS ON THE HISTORY OF BRITISH WATER-COLOUR
PAINTING

THE direct bearing of these remarks on our immediate subject-matter will, I hope, be evident to all who are familiar with the literature
of the history of British water-colour painting.
The first attempt to form an historical series of British water-colours for the public use was begun in 1857, by Samuel Redgrave for the
Science and Art Department of what was then the Board of Education. Thanks to Redgrave’s knowledge and enthusiasm a worthy
collection of examples of the works of the founders of the school was soon got together, and this nucleus was rapidly enlarged by
purchases, gifts, and bequests. These drawings were housed and exhibited in what was then called the South Kensington Museum, and
in 1877 Redgrave published an admirable “Descriptive Catalogue” of the collection. As an introduction to this catalogue he wrote a
valuable account of the origin and historical development of the art. Both the official character of this publication as well as its intrinsic
merits, literary and historical—for Redgrave and his brother Richard, who had assisted him in the work, were two of the best informed
historians of English art in the last century—combined to make it at the time and for many years afterwards the standard and most
authoritative book on this subject. But its historical part has one serious defect, due perhaps to some extent to the unfortunate
association of science with art in the same museum. Redgrave’s conception of artistic development was evidently borrowed ready-
made from the ideas of his scientific colleagues. He treats the chronological arrangement of the drawings in exactly the same way as the
men of science treat the successive alterations and improvements which Stevenson’s first model steam-engine underwent; and as he
found the earlier drawings approached very nearly to monochrome, while the later ones were highly coloured and fuller in the statement
and realization of detail, he took it for granted that these changes marked the true line of progress and development in the art. The early
“stained” drawings of Scott and Rooker were treated as the primitive and undeveloped models from which the later and more
elaborate works of Turner, Copley Fielding, Sidney Cooper, John F. Lewis, Louis Haghe, and Carl Werner were developed. Every
fresh complication of technique and elaboration of effect were hailed enthusiastically as signs of “progress,” and brilliance of colour,
richness of effect, and fullness of realization were treated as the marks of “the full perfection” of which the art was capable. In this way
water-colour “drawing” became “elevated” into the “perfected” art of painting in water-colours, and the beneficent cosmic process
triumphantly produced paintings in water-colour which could actually “hold their own” in force and brilliancy of effect with oil paintings.
As a temporary measure Redgrave’s excursus into evolutionary theory must have been extraordinarily successful. No more specious
doctrine could well have been invented to flatter and gratify all parties concerned at the moment; the presidents and leading members
of the two water-colour societies must have found peace and comfort in Redgrave’s theory, and the general public must have felt that

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“enlightenment and progress” even in artistic matters were being duly fostered by an efficient “Committee Council on Education.” But
the theory has serious defects. It sets up a false standard of artistic value, it withdraws attention from the higher beauties of art to focus
it upon merely materialistic and technical questions, and, what is perhaps still more serious, it prejudges the efforts of subsequent
artists, and closes the door to future changes and developments.
The importance of these latter considerations will be seen as soon as we turn our attention to the art of the present day and that of the
period which has intervened between it and the date of the publication of Redgrave’s catalogue. Consider for one moment the water-
colours of Whistler, Clausen, Wilson Steer, D. Y. Cameron, Anning Bell, Charles Sims, A. W. Rich, Charles Gere, and Romilly
Fedden, and judge them in terms of Redgrave’s formula! If we do we are bound to confess that they one and all stand condemned. If
Redgrave’s idea of the line of progress and advance is correct we are bound to believe that the works of these fine artists represent,
not progress and advance, but decay and loss. Indeed, the two chief movements in art in the last quarter of the last century, the
discovery of atmosphere as the predominant factor in pictorial representation—what may be called for the sake of brevity the whole
Impressionistic movement, and the later deliberate search for simplicity of statement, either in the interests of decorative effect or
emotional expression, were seriously thwarted and hindered by the demands for “exhibition finish,” so-called conscientious
workmanship, and a standard of professional technique—“real painting, as such,” as Ruskin called it—set up and maintained by the
erroneous theories of artistic progress of which Redgrave was only one of the exponents.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that any attempt to deal fairly and generously with the art of more recent times shall consciously
and deliberately dissociate itself from such theories.

(3) THE DEVELOPMENT OF SUBJECT-MATTER AND TECHNIQUE

AFTER what has been written above it is to be hoped that the dangers attending the use of the word “development” have been
exorcised. We intend to use the word merely as a synonym for chronological sequence, and we have been careful to point out that the
historical order in which artists appear does not coincide or run parallel with any growth, advance, progress, or improvement in the
artistic value of their work.
Shorn thus of its stolen finery of theoretical prejudice and philosophical imposture the naked course of chronological sequence presents
few attractions to the enthusiastic lover of the beautiful. It has, however, its uses. These are mainly mnemonical, for it supplies the
thread on which we string together in our memory the things strewn along the schedule of the years without apparent rhyme or reason.
The dates will not help us to pick out the good from the bad, but they help us to place among their proper surroundings the good things
which our sympathies and instincts find for us.
With this grudging apostrophe to the historical maid-of-all-work we will proceed with our survey of the brief tale of years during which
our national school of water-colour painting has been in existence. The business of this chapter is to outline the development of form
and content, of subject-matter and technique.
For the beginnings of British landscape painting we must look to the drawings and engravings connected with the study of topography,
using this word in the ordinary sense of place-drawing, or the description of a particular building or spot. Generally speaking the
designs of the earlier draughtsmen are now known only through the engravings which were made from them. Roget, in his “History of
the Old Water-Colour Society” (chapters i and iii, Book I) gives a full and interesting account of these engravings. The earliest
drawings we need refer to are those of Samuel Scott (1710-1772) and his pupil, William Marlow (1740-1813), Paul Sandby (1725-
1809), William Pars (1742-1782), Michael Angelo Rooker (1743-1801), and Thomas Hearne (1744-1817).
Working alongside these artists was another group of men who produced “landscapes” which relied for their interest rather upon the
sentiments evoked by their subject-matter and treatment than upon the purely topographical character of their work. These painters of
poetical or sentimental landscape may be said to have begun with George Lambert (1710?-1765), Richard Wilson (1713-1782), and
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Of these only the latter used water-colour as an independent medium. His Landscape with
Waggon on a Road through a Wood (British Museum) reminds one somewhat of the landscape studies of Rubens and Van Dyck, at
least as regards the colour-effect and the feeling for atmosphere. Through Gainsborough the influence of Rubens and that of the
Flemish conception of landscape painting was brought to bear on British art, while Lambert and Richard Wilson familiarized the
younger artists and their patrons with the style and aims of Poussin and Claude. The same influences are discernible in the works of
Alexander Cozens (d. 1786) and his son, John Robert Cozens (1752-1799), both of whom worked almost entirely in water-colour.
The works of these painters of poetical landscape taught the public to demand something more emotional in feeling and more dignified
and impressive in treatment than the prosaic transcripts and conventionally composed drawings of the topographers. Their example
also taught the rising generation of artists, amongst whom we find Edward Dayes (1763-1804), John Glover (1767-1849), Joshua
Cristall (1767?-1847), F. L. T. Francia (1772-1839), Thomas Girtin (1775-1802), J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), John Constable
(1776-1837), and John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), how to meet those demands.
In Turner’s Warkworth Castle (V. and A. Museum), exhibited in 1799, and Girtin’s Bridgnorth (British Museum), painted in 1802,
we find these two streams of influence uniting. These drawings are at the same time both topographical and poetical; each represents a
particular place with a good deal of accuracy, but in such a way that the drawing might just as correctly be called a poetical landscape
as a topographical representation.
This combination of fact with emotion, of representation with poetry, has remained during the whole of the nineteenth century and
down to the present day the dominant characteristic of British landscape painting. Sometimes the topographical factor was subdued or
almost submerged, as in the water-colours of George Barret, junr. (1767-1842) and Francis Oliver Finch (1802-1862), but it is
generally predominant, though always in combination with emotional or poetical expression, in the works of William Havell (1782-
1857), David Cox (1783-1859), Peter De Wint (1784-1849), Copley Fielding (1787-1855), G. F. Robson (1788-1833), Samuel

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Prout (1783-1852), William Hunt (1790-1864), Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867), David Roberts (1796-1864), J. D. Harding (1797
or 8-1863), R. P. Bonington (1802-1828), T. Shotter Boys (1803-1874), J. Scarlett Davis (1804?-1844), J. F. Lewis (1805-1876),
W. J. Muller (1812-1845), William Callow (1812-1908), Birket Foster (1825-1899), A. W. Hunt (1830-1896), E. M. Wimperis
(1835-1900), Tom Collier (1840-1891), and J. Buxton Knight (1842-1908).
The course of development of the subject-matter of British landscape painting in water-colour we may, therefore, say has been
somewhat as follows: it started with the object of recording as clearly and accurately as was possible the appearance of buildings and
places, and it did this, not for purely artistic reasons, but in the interests of antiquarian, archæological, historical, or geographical
information; by the side of this place-recording activity there sprang up a series of painters who aimed at the production of landscapes
as the means of artistic and emotional expression; we then find these two groups acting on each other, the poetical school teaching the
topographers style, design, “atmosphere,” and emotion, and the topographers directing the attention of the poetical painters to the
observation and study of nature and the expression of

[Image unavailable.]

PLATE II.

(In the possession of Thomas Girtin, Esq.)

“THE VALLEY OF THE AIRE.” BY THOMAS GIRTIN.

their own personal emotions; and the outcome of this process is the present school of British landscape painters in water-colours,
which attempts, both in its highest and in its lowest efforts, to do full justice to the progressive demands which the educated public has
thus learned to make on the artist.
We turn now to the development of technique. The earliest topographers worked on white paper, on which, after the subject had been
outlined in pencil—such outlines being sometimes enforced with pen and ink, the general system of light and shade was washed in
monochrome; the local colours were then washed over this preparation. The method, so far as the colours were concerned, was
somewhat similar to that of tinting or colouring an engraving. In drawings executed in this manner by Sandby, Rooker, and Hearne the
brilliance of the colours is somewhat subdued by the grey underpainting. But this is probably due to the fact that the artists worked only
with their washes of transparent colour, relying upon the white paper asserting itself through these washes. The luminous effects
produced in this way—in drawings like Sandby’s Windsor: East View from Crown Corner (British Museum) and Rooker’s St.
Botolph’s (V. and A. Museum)—have been so much admired that many living artists have deliberately gone back to this simple way
of working.
The effect of the grey underpainting on the finished work is, however, largely dependent on the artist’s wishes. If he chooses to
sacrifice the luminosity of the white paper he can paint over his preliminary washes with colour so heavily charged that it will practically
annihilate them. This is what Girtin generally did in his later works, though it must be added that he also changed the colour of his
preparatory washes from grey to brown. I am inclined to think, therefore, that Redgrave has exaggerated the importance of the use or
disuse of these preliminary washes.
The earlier poetical painters, like Lambert, and Sandby in his larger compositions painted for exhibition purposes, worked in body-
colour, i.e., opaque white was mixed with all the colours. In this way some approximation to the force of oil painting was obtained.
Another way of getting a similar result was to work with the paper wet. A good example of this method is Turner’s Warkworth
Castle. In this picture Turner tries to do in water-colour what Richard Wilson did in oils. He gets his effects of deep rich tone and
force of colour by working with a heavily charged brush, sponging, and wiping out the lights with a dry brush or handkerchief or
scraping them with a knife.
The methods of Warkworth Castle were practically those used by the younger Barret, Varley, Copley Fielding, Cox, and De Wint,
but after about 1830 we find opaque white coming into general use, at first merely to give increased force to the high lights, but later it
was mixed freely with all the transparent colours, and toned or tinted paper was used to give greater brilliance to the body-colour.
John F. Lewis worked in this way, but the hardness and glitter to which it so easily conduced led to its abandonment by the later artists
who set themselves to render the delicate gradations of the atmosphere. Yet one must admit that in the hands of a master technician
like Turner all the unpleasant qualities so often apparent in body-colour work can be avoided, as the Rivers of France drawings
prove. At the present time some artists, who aim especially at force and brilliance of colour, prefer to work in tempera, but it is
doubtful whether this medium can rightly be regarded as a form of water-colour painting.
On the whole we may say that the technique of water-colour has changed very little during the last two centuries. The chief change has
perhaps been connected with the introduction, about 1830, of moist colours put up in metal tubes, a great convenience to artists in
search of bold effects without the expenditure of much time or trouble. But even this has proved a doubtful advantage, and many artists
have now gone back to the use of hard cakes of colour, similar to those with which the earlier men obtained their delicate and luminous
results.

(4) SOME FAMOUS WATER-COLOUR PAINTERS OF THE PAST

IN the previous section we have deliberately refrained from saying anything about the purely artistic qualities of the works we have
referred to. This is because we have been engaged in a strictly historical survey, and to the eye of history there is no difference
between the works of a great artist and those of a bungler. Both are equally patent and indubitable facts. It is the business of criticism

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to appraise the artistic beauty of works of art. And if in our historical survey we have kept our attention fixed generally on the works of
the greater men, this is more the result of accident than design. Art criticism has already sifted much of the good from the bad in the
work of the past, and it is more convenient, in a general survey of this kind, to deal with what is best known and valued. But because
history can thus take advantage of what art criticism has done, that is no reason why we should confuse the two processes, and it
cannot be repeated too often that historical importance or interest has nothing whatever to do with artistic value.
The aim of this section is to make good the defects of historical study, so far, at least, as the limited space at our disposal will permit.
With this object in view we have selected a baker’s dozen of the more famous artists of the past, and we will endeavour to indicate
some of the qualities which make their works a joy and delight to those who have the privilege of knowing them. In each case we will
supply, in tabloid form, a certain amount of biographical information, as knowledge of the time and place in which an artist works and
the conditions under which he produces helps us to understand what he has done; we shall also attempt to point out the chief public
galleries where each artist’s works

[Image unavailable.]

PLATE III.

(In the possession of Messrs. J. Palser & Sons.)

“KIRKHAM ABBEY.” BY JOHN SELL COTMAN, R.W.S.

can be seen (when happier times bring about the reopening of our museums and art galleries), and the sources from which those who
care for it can obtain fuller information and more authoritative criticism than we ourselves can supply. Such information as we can give
will be as correct as we can make it, but it will make no claim whatever to be exhaustive.

PAUL SANDBY

[Born at Nottingham, 1725; entered military drawing office of the Tower of London, 1746; draughtsman to a survey of the Northern
and Western Highlands, 1748-1751, during which time he published some etchings of Scottish views; worked at Windsor for some
years from 1752, where his brother, Thomas, was Deputy Ranger; chief drawing-master, Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, 1768-
1797; elected Director of the Society of Artists, October 18, 1766; original member of Royal Academy, 1768; introduced the aquatint
method of engraving into England; published first set of twelve aquatints of views in South Wales, 1774, a second set of views in North
Wales, 1776, and a third set in 1777; died 1809.

EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1760-’68; Royal Academy, 1769-’77, ’79-’82, ’86-’88, ’90-’95, ’97-1802, ’06-’09; Free Society, 1782, ’83.

WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: NATIONAL GALLERY; V. AND A. MUSEUM (WATER-COLOURS); BRITISH MUSEUM; NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND; GREENWICH
Hospital; Diploma Gallery, R.A.; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Norwich, Nottingham, Glasgow, etc., Art Galleries.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: “THOMAS AND PAUL SANDBY,” BY WILLIAM SANDBY, 1892; “D. N. B.”; ROGET’S “HISTORY OF THE OLD WATER-
Colour Society,” 1891.

REPRODUCTIONS OF WORKS: “THE EARLIER ENGLISH WATER-COLOUR PAINTERS,” BY COSMO MONKHOUSE; “THE ENGLISH WATER-COLOUR PAINTERS,” BY A.
J. FINBERG; “EARLY ENGLISH WATER-COLOUR,” BY C. E. HUGHES; “WATER-COLOUR,” BY THE HON. NEVILLE LYTTON; “WATER-COLOUR PAINTING,” BY A. W.
Rich; “The Royal Academy” (THE STUDIO Summer Number, 1904); THE STUDIO, Jan. 1918.]

Sandby was one of the most prolific of the earlier topographical artists. His numberless drawings and the engravings he made from
them did more than any one man had done before to familiarize Englishmen with the beauties of their native land. He was an
indefatigable traveller, and he was the first artist to discover the artistic beauties of Wales.
He worked both in transparent colour and in gouache. His drawings in the latter medium, of which there are several in the V. and A.
Museum, are distinctly inferior to his works in pure colour. They are scenic and conventional in design, feeble and pretentious in
execution. His drawings in transparent colour, however, are delightfully fresh and vigorous; luminous in effect, and filled with proofs of
keen and genial observation. They seem full of air and light, vivid human interest, and in their treatment of architecture and of all natural
features they are at once careful, accurate and lucid without ever showing signs of labour or fatigue. In the abundance of his work and
its variety Sandby approached nearer to Turner than any other artist. But he had not Turner’s subtlety of eye and hand, nor his
exquisite sense of artistic form. His landscapes are well composed, but on conventional lines, and the whole material is never welded
together into an original and impeccable design, as with Turner, Cozens, and Cotman.
Sandby’s Welsh aquatints with their many daring effects of light form the real forerunners of Turner’s “Liber Studiorum.” They display
better than any single drawing the width and range of the artist’s powers.
As an engraver and water-colour painter Paul Sandby is a genial and inspiriting personality. He transformed topographical
draughtsmanship into something new and living, instinct with life and emotion. “And if we may not call him a great artist, we may at
least say that he was a topographical draughtsman of genius.”

ALEXANDER COZENS

[Born in Russia, date unknown; son of Peter the Great and an Englishwoman; sent by his father to study painting in Italy; said to have
come to England in 1746; drawing-master at Eton School, 1763-1768; married a sister of Robert Edge Pine; elected Fellow of the

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Society of Artists, 1765; died in Duke Street, Piccadilly, April 23, 1786.

EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1760, ’63, ’65-’71; Free Society, 1761, ’62; Royal Academy, 1772, ’73, ’75, ’77-’79, ’81.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. and A. Museum (Water-Colours); British Museum; Manchester Whitworth Institute.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: LESLIE’S “HANDBOOK FOR YOUNG PAINTERS”; REDGRAVE’S “DICTIONARY”; “REMINISCENCES OF HENRY ANGELO,”
vol. i, 212-216; “D. N. B.”
REPRODUCTIONS: THE STUDIO, Feb. 1917; Finberg’s “English Water-Colour Painters.”]

The date when Alexander Cozens came to England is given above as 1746. This is what we find in all the reference books, and it is
founded on a memorandum pasted in a book of drawings made by the artist in Italy which is now in the British Museum. This
memorandum states that “Alexander Cozens, in London, author of these drawings, lost them, and many more, in Germany, by their
dropping from his saddle, when he was riding on his way from Rome to England, in the year 1746. John Cozens, his son, being at
Florence in the year 1776, purchased them. When he returned to London in the year 1779 he delivered the drawings to his father.”
Now either the date in this note is wrong or, what seems a more probable explanation, Alexander Cozens’s journey to England in
1746 was not the occasion of his first visit to this country, for there is an engraved View of the Royal College of Eton, after a
drawing made by Cozens, which was published in 1742. It was engraved by John Pine, whose daughter afterwards became Alexander
Cozens’s wife. The existence of this engraving, which has been noticed by none of the writers on Cozens’s life, seems to point to the
probability that the artist came to England at least four years earlier than has been supposed. It also shows how little we know about
Cozens’s early life, and it suggests a certain amount of scepticism about the constantly repeated statements on this subject which rest,
apparently, either on dubious authority or on authority which has not or cannot be verified.
Alexander Cozens’s work attracted little attention in modern times until the late Mr. Herbert Home perceived its beauties. Public
attention was first drawn to it by the “Historical Collection of British Water-Colours” organized by the Walpole Society in the Loan
Exhibition held at the Grafton Galleries at the end of 1911, which included five beautiful drawings by Cozens. This was followed, in
1916, by an exhibition of Mr. Home’s collection of drawings with special reference to the works of Alexander Cozens, held by the
Burlington Fine Arts Club. To the catalogue of this exhibition Mr. Laurence Binyon contributed a valuable article on “Alexander
Cozens and his Influence on English Painting.” In this article Mr. Binyon does justice to Cozen’s originality of design and to the
emotional power of his drawings. “In his freest vein he uses his brush with a loose impetuosity which reminds one curiously of Chinese
monochrome sketches—the kind of work beloved by those Chinese artists who valued spontaneous freshness and personal
expressiveness above all else in landscape.” “It was indeed,” Mr. Binyon adds, “the naked elements” (of landscape structure) “rather
than the superficial aspects of a scene which appealed to his imagination; and in nature it was the solitary and the spacious rather than
the agreeably picturesque which evoked his deepest feelings.”
Alexander Cozens used colour sparingly and seldom. His best drawings are either in bistre or in indian ink, and he was fond of
working on stained, or perhaps oiled, paper (which was formerly used for tracing). Such paper has doubtless acquired a darker tone
with age, and it adds to the “sombreness” of which contemporaries complained in his drawings.

JOHN ROBERT COZENS

[Son of Alexander Cozens, born 1752; made sketching tour in Switzerland and Italy, with R. Payne Knight, 1776-1779; again visited
Switzerland and Italy, this time in company with William Beckford, 1782; became insane, 1794; died, it is said, 1799.

EXHIBITED: Society of Artists, 1767-’71; Royal Academy, 1776.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. AND A. MUSEUM (WATER-COLOURS); BRITISH MUSEUM; NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND; MANCHESTER WHITWORTH
Institute; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Oldham Art Gallery (Charles E. Lees’ Collection); Manchester Art Gallery (James Blair Bequest).
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Edwards’s “Anecdotes”; Leslie’s “Handbook”; Redgrave’s “Century” and “Dictionary”; “D. N. B.”
REPRODUCTIONS: Cosmo Monkhouse’s, Finberg’s, Hughes’s and Rich’s works, already cited; THE STUDIO, Feb. 1917.]

It is really surprising that we know so little about this artist. During his lifetime his works were much sought after, and he must have
been personally known to a number of distinguished people; both Payne Knight and the eccentric millionaire, William Beckford, the
author of “Vathek,” and owner and rebuilder of Fonthill Abbey, with whom he travelled in Italy and Switzerland, and who both
possessed a large number of his drawings, were voluminous writers, yet neither has deigned to tell us anything of interest about the
character, personality, or even outward appearance of this very great artist. Both Beckford and Knight wrote accounts of their travels,
but one searches them in vain for a single word that would prove that these highly intelligent men had the shadow of a notion that the
quiet and unobtrusive young “draughtsman” in their employ was one of the greatest artists their country had produced.
We do not know for certain where or when John Cozens was born nor when he died. Roget says he “appears to have been born
abroad when his parent was giving lessons in Bath,” but he gives no authority for the statement, and so far as I know it has not been
verified. The best evidence for the date of his birth seems to be Leslie’s statement that he once saw a small pen-drawing on which was
written, “Done by J. Cozens, 1761, when nine years of age.” If the date is correct Cozens was only fifteen when he began to exhibit at
the Society of Artists. Constable stated that Cozens died in 1796, but most of the authorities give the date as 1799.
That the artist was modest and unobtrusive, like his drawings, we may feel sure. As Leslie wrote, “So modest and unobtrusive are the
beauties of his drawings that you might pass them without notice, for the painter himself never says ‘Look at this, or that,’ he trusts
implicitly to your own taste and feeling; and his works are full of half-concealed beauties such as Nature herself shows but coyly, and
these are often the most fleeting appearances of light. Not that his style is without emphasis, for then it would be insipid, which it never
is, nor ever in the least commonplace.”

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Constable was one of the first to realize Cozens’s true greatness. “Cozens,” he said, “is all poetry,” and on another occasion he rather
shocked Leslie by asserting that Cozens was “the greatest genius that ever touched landscape.” Yet this assertion contains nothing but
the plain truth. Genius is the only word we can use to describe the intense concentration of mind and feeling which inspires Cozens’s
work. To the analytic eye his drawings are baffling and bewildering in the extreme; it is impossible to find a trace of cleverness or
conscious artifice in them. They make you feel that you are looking at the work of a somnambulist or of one who has painted in a
trance. They are, I believe, the most incorporeal paintings which have been produced in the Western world, for the paint and the
execution seem to count for so little and the personal inspiration for so much. The painter’s genius seems to speak to you direct, and to
impress and overawe you without the help of any intermediary.
In this respect Cozens is quite different from Turner. Even when he trusted most implicitly to his genius Turner was always the great
artist, the great colourist, the incomparable master of his technique whatever medium he was working in. Beyond the sheer beauty of
his simple washes of transparent colour there is hardly a single technical or executive merit in Cozens’s drawings that one can single out
for praise or even for notice. Their haunting beauty and incomparable power are spiritual, not material. And as we can think of a spirit
too pure and fine to inhabit a gross body like our own, so Cozens seems to be a genius too spiritual for form and colour and the
palpable artifices of representation. Certainly no English artist relied more serenely and confidently on his genius, and subdued his art
more absolutely to spiritual purposes. And this is what I think Constable meant when he called Cozens “the greatest genius that ever
touched landscape”; he did not say that he was the greatest artist.
As one of our illustrations we reproduce the drawing Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo by Cozens (Plate I) in the collection of Mr.
C. Morland Agnew.

THOMAS GIRTIN

[Born in Southwark, 1775; apprenticed to Edward Dayes; first engravings after his drawings published in “Copper Plate Magazine,”
1793; sketching tours, in the Midlands (Lichfield, etc.), 1794, Kent and Sussex 1795, Yorkshire and Scotland 1796, Devonshire
1797, Wales 1798, Yorkshire and Scotland 1799; “Girtin’s Sketching Society” established, 1799; married, 1800; went to Paris, Nov.
1801, and returned to England, May 1802; his Eidometropolis, or Great Panorama of London, exhibited at Spring Gardens, August,
1802; died Nov. 9, 1802; engravings of his views of Paris published shortly after his death.

EXHIBITED: Royal Academy, 1794, ’95, ’97-1801.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: V. AND A. MUSEUM (WATER-COLOURS); BRITISH MUSEUM; NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND AND IRELAND; MANCHESTER
Whitworth Institute; Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums; Oldham Art Gallery (Charles E. Lees’ Collection).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: EDWARDS’S “ANECDOTES”; DAYES’ “PROFESSIONAL SKETCHES”; REDGRAVE’S “CENTURY” AND “DICTIONARY”;
B.F.A. Club’s Catalogue, 1875; Roget’s “History”; Binyon’s “Life and Works,” 1900; Walpole Society’s Vols. II. and V.

REPRODUCTIONS: BINYON’S “LIFE”; MONKHOUSE’S, FINBERG’S, HUGHES’S, LYTTON’S, AND RICH’S WORKS ALREADY CITED;
THE STUDIO (CENTENARY OF

Thomas Girtin Number), Nov. 1902; THE STUDIO, May 1916; Walpole Society’s Vols. II. and V.]

Compared with John Cozens’s work Girtin’s appears often self-conscious and artificial. His drawings were admired by his
contemporaries chiefly on account of their style; references to the “sword-play” of his pencil, the boldness and swiftness of his washes,
constantly recur in their eulogies of his work. Girtin was nearly always a stylist, and often a mannerist. But his style, at its best, is so
thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of his work that it is difficult to separate the two. His love of the sweeping lines of the open
moorland and his passion for height and space appeal irresistibly to our imagination, while the broad simplicity of his vision, his
restrained and truthful colour, and his frank, bold, decisive handling seem the only adequate means by which his inspiration could find
clear and authoritative expression.
We must remember, too, that Girtin died at the age of twenty-seven. The knowledge of his early and untimely death intensifies our
admiration for all he did; while the few supreme masterpieces of poetical landscape he has left us, like the Plinlimmon, show clearly
what our national art lost by the tragedy of his early death.
Girtin seems to have mastered his art as Robert Louis Stevenson mastered his, by “playing the sedulous ape” to the men he admired.
There are now in the British Museum copies he made after Antonio Canal, Piranesi, Hearne, Marlow, and Morland. Of these masters
Canal seems to have impressed and taught him most. The spaciousness and breadth of effect of all his topographical work are clearly
the outcome of his admiration for Canal’s drawings and paintings. The calligraphic quality of his line work, what has been called the
“sword-play” of his pencil, is also due to the same influence.
His earlier drawings, made about 1792 and 1793, were, however, modelled on the style of his master, Edward Dayes. The drawings
he made after James Moore’s sketches—of which several have been recently acquired by the Ashmolean Museum—might easily be
mistaken for Dayes’ work. They only differ in being more accomplished and workmanlike than those which his master made for the
same patron, and in their deliberate avoidance of the dark “repoussoir” of which Dayes was so fond in his foregrounds—an avoidance
which gives Girtin’s drawings a greater unity and a more decorative effect than those of Dayes.
By about 1795 Girtin’s real style began to assert itself, in drawings like those of Lichfield and Peterborough Cathedrals. From this time
we find him pouring forth an abundance of superb topographical subjects instinct with style and ennobled with poetry and imagination
—drawings like Rievaulx Abbey (1798), in the V. and A. Museum, Carnarvon Castle, and The Old Ouse Bridge, York, both in the
possession of his great-grandson, Mr. Thomas Girtin. The noble studies for his Panorama of London (made probably in 1801), his
Lindisfarne (?1797) and Bridgnorth (1802), are fortunately in the British Museum. The drawings he made on his return from Paris,
during the last sad months of his fast-ebbing life—drawings like the Porte St. Denis—are amongst the most superb of his splendid
productions.

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I will close these brief and inadequate remarks by copying out two advertisements connected with Girtin’s “Panorama” which I believe
have not been printed or referred to by any one of the writers on his life and work. The first appeared in “The Times” on August 27,
1802. It runs as follows: “Eidometropolis, or Great Panoramic Picture of London, Westminster, and Environs, now exhibiting at the
Great Room, Spring Gardens, Admission 1s. T. Girtin returns his most grateful thanks to a generous Public for the encouragement
given to his Exhibition, and as it has been conceived to be merely a Picture framed, he further begs leave to request of the Public to
notice that it is Panoramic, and from its magnitude, which contains 1944 square feet, gives every object the appearance of being the
size of nature. The situation is so chosen as to shew to the greatest advantage the Thames, Somerset House, the Temple Gardens, all
the Churches, Bridges, principal Buildings, &c., with the surrounding country to the remotest distance, interspersed with a variety of
objects characteristic of the great Metropolis. His views of Paris, etched by himself, are in great forwardness, and to be seen with the
Picture as above.”
The second notice is as follows: “Thursday, 11 Nov., 1802. The Public are most respectfully informed that in consequence of the
decease of Mr. Thomas Girtin, his Panorama of London exhibiting at Spring Gardens, will be shut till after his interment, when it will be
re-opened for the benefit of his widow and children, under the management of his brother, Mr. John Girtin.”
As an example of Girtin’s work we reproduce The Valley of the Aire with Kirkstall Abbey (Plate II), from Mr. Thomas Girtin’s
collection.

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER

[Born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, 23 April, 1775; worked in Life Academy, R.A. schools, 1792-1799; A.R.A., 1799, R.A.
1802; first tour on Continent, 1802; first part of “Liber Studiorum” issued, 1807; Professor of Perspective, R.A., 1807-1837;
Crossing the Brook exhibited 1815; published “Southern Coast” series of engravings, 1814-1826, “Views in Sussex,” 1816-1820,
Hakewill’s “Italy,” 1818-1820, “Richmondshire,” 1818-1823, “Provincial Antiquities of Scotland,” 1819-1826, “England and Wales,”
1827-1838, Rogers’s “Italy,” 1830, and “Poems,” 1834, “Rivers of France,” 1833-1835; exhibited Rain, Steam, and Speed, 1844;
died Dec. 18, 1851.

EXHIBITED: ROYAL ACADEMY, 1790-1804, ’06-’20, ’22, ’23, ’25-’47, ’49, ’50; BRITISH INSTITUTION, 1806, ’8, ’9, ’14, ’17, ’35-’41, ’46; SOCIETY
OF BRITISH ARTISTS, 1833, ’34; INSTITUTION FOR ENC. OF F.A., EDINBURGH, 1824; COOKE’S EXHIBITIONS, 1822-’24; NORTHERN ACADEMY OF ARTS,
NEWCASTLE, 1828; R. BIRMINGHAM S. OF ARTISTS, 1829, ’30, ’34, ’35, ’47; LIVERPOOL ACADEMY, 1831, ’45; R. MANCHESTER INSTITUTION, 1834, ’35;
Leeds Exhibition, 1839.
WORKS IN PUBLIC GALLERIES: NATIONAL GALLERY; V. AND A. MUSEUM; BRITISH MUSEUM;
NATIONAL GALLERIES OF IRELAND AND SCOTLAND; ASHMOLEAN AND

Fitzwilliam Museums; Manchester Whitworth Institute; Bury Art Gallery, etc. etc.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: Peter Cunningham’s Memoir, in John Burnet’s “Turner and his Works,” 1852; Alaric Watts’s Memoir, in
“LIBER FLUVIORUM,” 1853; RUSKIN’S “MODERN PAINTERS” AND “PRETERITA”; THORNBURY’S “LIFE, ETC.,” 2 VOLS., 1862; HAMERTON’S “LIFE,” 1879;
MONKHOUSE’S “TURNER” (IN “GREAT ARTISTS SERIES”), 1882; C. F. BELL’S “EXHIBITED WORKS OF TURNER,” 1901; SIR WALTER ARMSTRONG’S “TURNER,”
1902; Finberg’s “Turner’s Sketches and Drawings,” 1910; etc. etc.
REPRODUCTIONS: ARMSTRONG’S “TURNER”; WEDMORE’S “TURNER AND RUSKIN”; “THE GENIUS OF TURNER” (
THE STUDIO SPECIAL NUMBER, 1903);

“HIDDEN TREASURES AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY,” 1905; “THE WATER-COLOURS OF J. M. W. TURNER” (
THE STUDIO SPRING NUMBER, 1909); “TURNER’S

Water-Colours at Farnley Hall” (THE STUDIO Special Number, 1912); Walpole Society’s Vols. I., III., and VI.]

Turner’s first exhibited water-colour, a View of the Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth (1790), is a poor imitation of Malton’s least
inspired topographical drawings. But he learned quickly. His Inside of Tintern Abbey, (1794) shows that before he was twenty he
could draw and paint Gothic architecture better than any of the older topographical artists. His pre-eminence as a topographical
draughtsman was firmly established by 1797, when he had painted such works as the Lincoln Cathedral (1795), Llandaff
Cathedral (1796), Westminster Abbey: St. Erasmus and Bishop Islip’s Chapel (1796), and Wolverhampton (1796).
From 1796 to 1804 Turner’s style changed, chiefly under the influence of Richard Wilson’s works, which he studied and copied
diligently. These years saw the production of Norham Castle (1798), Warkworth Castle (1799), Edinburgh, from Calton Hill
(1804), The Great Fall of the Reichenbach (done in 1804, but not exhibited till 1815), and the wonderful sketches in th...